World Digest

Milan Stojanovic has a new tic-tac-toe adversary in his Columbia University laboratory, and after 100 matches he has yet to beat it. "There's no way," he says.

Who is this tic-tac titan? A computer, of course. Only here's the twist: its brain is based on molecules of DNA.

The double helix is turning into a growing draw for computer scientists. DNA is tiny - a 1000 billion molecules squeeze into a single drop of water. It performs chemical reactions at blinding speed and a gram of the stuff can store as much as 1000 billion CDs, scientists estimate.

Since the first DNA computer was devised in 1994, they have been error-prone, unresponsive and capable of solving only obscure problems. Now, Stojanovic (pictured) and computer scientist Darko Stefanovic, of the University of New Mexico, have licked at least one of those issues by creating the first interactive biocomputer. MAYA, as they've dubbed their tic-tac-toe device, is described in the latest edition of Nature Biotechnology.

Players select from a series of test tubes, each containing DNA designated for a specific square. Then they dribble the tube's contents into the nine wells of the game, not just the one they intended to mark. As the strands chemically combine, one of the squares will gradually glow green. This is MAYA's move.

MAYA always gets to go first and is always assumed to pick the middle square. Humans must select as their first move either the upper left-hand corner or the square below. After that, anything goes. - The Baltimore Sun

SEATTLE, US: Boeing opens gate to Polaris

Boeing, the world's biggest maker of aeroplanes, has separated its business that makes software filters for email into a venture called MessageGate. The lead investor will be venture capital company Polaris Venture Partners LP, which operates out of Seattle and Massachusetts, Chicago-based Boeing said.

The so-called "spin out" of MessageGate is part of an effort begun in 2000 to encourage employees to develop technology and processes into new businesses. MessageGate's filters target junk mail, pornography and threats such as computer viruses. - Bloomberg

SHANGHAI, CHINA: Kingsoft challenges Microsoft

Kingsoft, one of China's biggest software companies, is close to sealing a contract that will result in its flagship product replacing Microsoft Office on hundreds of thousands of computers in Shanghai schools, the Financial Times has reported on its website.

Under the deal, which is likely to be signed next month, Kingsoft will supply its WPS Office 2003 suite of software for use in computer training classes in more than 2000 Shanghai primary and secondary schools, the report said.

The move will fuel hopes among local software companies that government support and low prices will help reduce Microsoft's dominance over the Chinese market for operating systems and applications, according to the report.

Kingsoft is expected to supply, on average, 100 copies to each school at a price considerably below the WPS Office 2003 list price, the report said. - Dow Jones Newswires

LAS VEGAS, US: SCO sullies its case

The software company that claims to own key pieces of the free Linux operating system undermined its case by displaying samples of the disputed code - which critics then traced back to a decades-old program released with few restrictions.

SCO Group set off a firestorm in the technology world earlier this year by suing IBM, alleging that the computing giant improperly contributed SCO-owned code to Linux. For years, SCO and its predecessor have owned the rights to much of an operating system called Unix, which much of Linux imitates.

SCO's lawsuit angered supporters of Linux, who feel strongly that the software - developed by programmers who donated their efforts - should be free. SCO has been countersued by IBM. Another lawsuit by Linux distributor Red Hat accuses SCO of trying to scare off Linux users. SCO chief executive Darl McBride has pressed Linux users to sign a licensing agreement to avoid being sued.

During a slide-show presentation on the lawsuit at a conference in Las Vegas for SCO's Unix users, investors and others last week, SCO executives displayed identical lines of code from Linux and from SCO's flagship version of Unix, known as System V.

They wanted to show that the Linux code was an illegal copy of System V. An audience member took pictures, which were published on the website of a German computer magazine. Although some of the lines had been rendered in Greek for the presentation, technologists studied the pictures and translated them back. The result, they said, was code dating back as far as 1973, before SCO came into being.

Since Utah-based SCO later bought the rights to old code, that wouldn't destroy its legal case. But it doesn't help its claim that its most sophisticated intellectual property has been used to make Linux robust enough for corporate computers. - Los Angeles Times